Flappy Bird review: ‘Dark Souls’ distilled

Firstly, download Flappy Bird (it’s free) for iOS or Android.

Secondly, play it.

Thirdly, keep playing it. Resist the urge to uninstall it.

Finally, allow your head to combust.

Flappy Birds is a few things: frustrating, addictive, simple and above all, the purest game to roll onto iOS and Android since Dots. It’s weird to even review it.

Flappy Birds does what Super Hexagon did for geometry, by providing an unflappable representation of gameplay. Consistency, when presented in a digital form lends itself to analogous behaviour. In other words, a great game vanishes beneath the fingertips and provides a clear, coherent path of which we are the travellers, and the road is Flappy Bird. The pipes are the obstacles in our path and the rhythmic tap-based controls are a soothing balm in an era of touchscreen interfaces that are so complex, we’ve started to build gamepads that fit around our devices. Enough is bloody enough.

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